John Magee’s Native Landscape Designs Create Habitat for Wildlife

John Magee of Magee Design in Middleburg, Virginia, works with clients to create artistic landscapes that provide habitat for wildlife. He recently announced that he will begin installing his projects through WildWood Landscape, a major Northern Virginia landscape firm. "One defining principle for me as a landscaper,” Magee tells me, “is getting people to use native plants in their landscape -- that contributes to habitat. That’s kind of where I start.”

Many of Magee’s designs have qualified for the National Wildlife Federation‘s (NWF) Certified Wildlife Habitat program, which rewards homeowners, schools, parks, businesses, or other entities for creating wildlife-friendly outdoor spaces. To qualify, projects have to provide food, water, and cover for wildlife and a place for wildlife to raise their young. Magee stresses that you don’t have to have a big yard to provide that kind of space: “You can get those things on any size property,” he says. And you don’t have to think in terms of larger animals. “It doesn’t have to be cougars and bears. I’ve got a hummingbird feeder on my back porch that about 20 hummingbirds frequent.”

Over the last couple centuries of increased settlement, humans have broken up the original North American forest, destroying wildlife habitat in the process. But habitat-oriented landscape design can make a difference. Magee says,

“Even as habitat becomes more and more disrupted by development, we’re creating more and more little islands of habitat. Wildlife can move and migrate from one to another of them. Areas that used to be forest are now subdivisions, but as we create more islands it makes things easier for wildlife. We can reconnect things more back the way they probably should be.”